Future Culture 2026-2027
Internships, artist residency
Please click here to learn more about Future Culture 2024-2025.
How do you build a more relevant, equitable, sustainable and future-focused arts culture?
You invest time and money in the people; and you create multi-directional opportunities for sharing, learning and growing relationships. Future Culture is a program from CuriousWorks that aims to do all of that.
It pairs an artist residency program with an arts worker development program, embedding all creatives in the company's operations to benefit the artists, arts workers, and the organisation symbiotically; and in turn to nurture sector development and foster sustainability for the community arts and cultural development sector.
2026 - 2027 Cohort
Keep an eye on our website and social channels as we will continue to share updates on how the program progresses.
Artists in Residence: Fei Gao & Tala Issaoui
Creative Producer Intern: Liliana Occhiuto
Arts Leadership Interns: Esky Escandor & Shyamla Eswaran
Fei Gao
Future Culture Artist in Residence
Future Culture Artist in Residence
Fei Gao’s practice spans costume-making, somatic movement practice, kinetic sculptural design, and digital world-building. Through these mediums, Fei builds layered visual and spatial systems that operate as both narrative devices and psychological architectures.
For Fei, healing is understood as the gradual return of agency: a process of becoming unstuck and recognising one’s capacity to change.
Tala Issaoui
Future Culture Artist in Residence
Future Culture Artist in Residence
Tala Issaoui is an emerging multidisciplinary artist based in Western Sydney. Her work explores mysticism and its relationship to the self, investigated as a vessel to connect reality and the metaphysical. She works around the mediums of film, sound, and performance as movement and dance in the experimental form. Tala is a graduate of Macquarie University, completing the Bachelor of Media and Communications (Screen Practice and Production/Moving Image and Sound Studies) from 2020-2022.
She was a part of the Utp Rising Program by Utp (2021-2023), where she created works across video, installation and live performance which include 'above, so below' (2021-2022), 'Ode To My Soulmate?' (2022), and 'void...' (2023).
Tala has also created works for JUXTA, making a video work illustrating the FIRE theme, showcased as part of the NEXUS event at the Bankstown Arts Centre (2022). In the same year, she was commissioned from JUXTA to create a sound work that responded to the theme of EARTH, which was exhibited as part of the Bankstown Biennale (2022).
In 2024, she continued to display her work in gallery spaces. She exhibited her first-ever solo exhibition at Puzzle gallery called 'Ode To My Void' which conjoined both her works 'Ode To My Soulmate?' and 'void...'. The work was also on exhibition at PARI, as part of the 'Embrace' group exhibition.
Tala was also a 2024 Burwood Art Prize Finalist, for her video work 'as above, so below' (2021-2022) for the theme Visibility, Ritual and Legacy.
Tala's most recent work, 'Once in a Blue Moon' was a live experimental movement based work, a cultivation of previous works which included ‘Ode To My Soulmate?’ (2022) and ‘void…’ (2023) that explored transformation, rebirth and ritual embodiment. It was showcased as part of the Sydney Fringe Festival (PYT@FRINGE). In the same year, Tala created the sound design for a live theatre work called 'Hayat Amina (Safe Life)' at PYT Fairfield (2025).
She has also created soundscapes for writers with All The Best at FBi radio, which showcase her experimental and ambient melodies she produces. Some of her works include '#600 safe' (2024), '#628 Illuminated Manuscript' (2025), '#653 Tubig Lang (just water)' (2025) and '#687 don't talk about the water' (2026).
Liliana Occhiuto
Future Culture Creative Producer Intern
Future Culture Creative Producer Intern
Liliana Occhiuto is a Western Sydney-based sound artist and Art Therapist who works across numerous artistic disciplines to create emotionally evocative and immersive pieces suited to art installations, film and theatre work.
Constructed with the intent to connect with the listener, audio samples are combined with commonplace instrumentation to create unconventional, conceptually rich pieces of sonic art. Elements of electronica, progressive rock, as well as the beauty in the sounds of everyday life are blended to help develop ambient environments that are texturally diverse and engaging.
Throughout her career as an artist and active collaborator, she has created works that have been displayed at numerous institutions, including Carriageworks, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, and PACT. Occhiuto has also created multidisciplinary pieces and facilitated learning through the Creative Leadership in Learning Program at the Sydney Opera House.
Esky Escandor
Future Culture Arts Leadership Intern
Future Culture Arts Leadership Intern
Ian "Esky" Escandor is a Western Sydney community arts practitioner, cultural producer and multidisciplinary artist working across comedy, music, film and community development. His work explores culture, identity and social change, whether that be through music, writing or stand up comedy, or through the curation of projects that connect artists and communities across Western Sydney. He has collaborated with organisations including Apple, Blacktown Arts, Sydney Opera House, CuriousWorks and the Ted Noffs Foundation, with his work presented at festivals including Sydney Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, Melbourne International Comedy Festival, Sydney Comedy Festival, SXSW Sydney and CineFestOz Film Festival. His creative practice has also been featured on Netflix, ABC and Channel 10's The Project, reflecting his commitment to amplifying diverse voices and building pathways for emerging artists.
Alongside his artistic practice, Esky has spent over a decade working in community arts and youth development, designing creative programs that use music, film and performance to support young people and strengthen local communities. As Program Coordinator at Street University Mt Druitt and founder of opnsrc.co, he has developed artist pathways through DJ workshops, Director of the Radio Program, coordinating programs at the Street University Mt Druitt site. His combined experience as an artist, producer and community member continues to shape his commitment to ever connecting community with a creative future.
Shyamla Eswaran
Future Culture Arts Leadership Intern
Future Culture Arts Leadership Intern
Shyamla (they/them) is a Western Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist, creative producer and facilitator whose practice moves between making art and building the conditions around it. Across creating, producing, curation, artistic direction and consultation, they centre artist agency, cultural responsibility and self-determined storytelling.
In 2019, Shyamla founded BINDI BOSSES, a South Asian and intercultural arts platform through which they made, curated and produced work for Sydney Opera House, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre.
Their credits include Movement Director/Choreographer for Daytime Deewane (Riverside Theatres), Creator and Independent Producer of DIASPHORIA (Create NSW-funded), Board Member of Dance Makers Collective, Co-curator of an inaugural dance festival in Western Sydney (2027), and Cultural Consultant for City of Parramatta. They served on the Board of Ausdance National (2021-2022).
A descendant of Indo-Fijian indentured labourers, Shyamla’s artistic practice explores caste, migration, responsibility to Country, gender fluidity, ancestral memory and belonging through movement, sound and the 3000-year-old Tamil artforms of Parai Attam and Silambam. Their debut solo work, GIRMITIYA, was presented as part of DirtyFeet’s sold-out Out of the Studio season at Sydney Dance Company in 2025.
Shyamla holds a Master of International Human Rights Law and Policy and received the 2020 Multicultural NSW Premier’s Harmony Medal for Arts and Culture.
CREDITS
Community Arts Senior Creative Producer: Kumari Abeydeera
Creative Producer: Miranda Aguilar
Photos: Dylan Mangunay
Future Culture 2026-2027 is supported by Minderoo Foundation.
Contact
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17 Kenyon St,
Fairfield, NSW, 2165,
Australia
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PO Box 112,
Liverpool, NSW, 1871,
Australia
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02 9602 9568
ABN 49 717 992 269
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Our office is located on Darug land at Fairfield City HQ. We would like to acknowledge the Cabrogal Clan of the Darug Nation, the traditional custodians of the land. Our work takes us across Darug, Dharawal and Eora lands. Sovereignty was never ceded.